Human spoken language has long been the subject of scientific investigation, particularly with regard to the mechanisms underpinning speech production. Likewise, the study of animal communications has a substantial literature, with many studies focusing on vocalisation. More recently, there has been growing interest in comparing animal communications and human speech. However, it is proposed here that such a comparison necessitates the appraisal of a minimum set of critical phenomena: i) the number of degrees-of-freedom of the vocal apparatus, ii) the ability to control those degrees-of-freedom independently, iii) the properties of the acoustic environment in which communication takes place, iv) the perceptual salience of the generated sounds, v) the degree to which sounds are contrastive, vi) the presence/absence of compositionality, and vii) the information rate(s) of the resulting communications.

翻译：人类口语长期以来一直是科学研究的对象，特别是关于言语产生机制的研究。同样，动物通讯研究也积累了丰富的文献，许多研究聚焦于发声行为。近年来，比较动物通讯与人类口语的研究兴趣日益增长。然而，本文提出此类比较必须评估一系列最低限度的关键现象：i) 发声器官的自由度数量，ii) 独立控制这些自由度的能力，iii) 通讯发生的声学环境特性，iv) 生成声音的感知显著性，v) 声音的对比性程度，vi) 组合性的存在与否，以及vii) 最终通讯的信息速率。